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a conclusion i couldn’t have predicted

The deal was that we were supposed to be up wicked early to go finish up everything in time for our inspection by the boss, then head off to the airport in the afternoon. I am ashamed to say that I just didn’t care about waking up on time. 😦 To the boys’ credit, they tried to make sure I was cared for by making sure I could get breakfast before I went to the job site, but I didn’t know that, so I didn’t go to the restaurant. I grabbed some fruit, checked my luggage with everyone else’s in the hotel lobby, and met up with the boys maybe an hour after they had started working.

One of the jobs I took on was to paint some 2x4s black to be used as bracing in the haunt. I ignored my audience of 6 guys, found some black paint, could not find a paint brush…could, however, find a full sized roller sans holder. (I should say, I did find other people painting over by the zombie shoot-em-up ride, but completely failed at getting anyone to understand that I could really really use a paint brush. *sigh*) So I shrugged, dipped the end of the roller into the paint, and started slowly painting the bracing.

Wanna feel really stupid? Go try to paint 2xs with just a roller. It’s a great time.

After maybe 30 minutes, one of my audience member found a small roller on a piece of coat hanger wire. He dipped it into the paint, rolled it across a board, and handed me the improvised roller. I thanked him, tried using it, found it to be completely useless, walked over to a trash can, threw it away. Went back to my big roller.

Then I had a great idea! I found C and asked him if he could ask the audience to paint these boards.

Instantly, a box of paint brushes showed up!

FML.

As I failed at painting, I noticed there was a small pile of haunt walls off to the side. They looked much the worse for wear, and we sorta raised an eyebrow, but we had a lot to get done, so a random pile of walls was nowhere near our list of things to worry about right then. A bigger concern was the random park attendees that decided the haunt must be open for business and started wandering through as we were trying to finish up last minute details.

Good times, y’all!

Our inspection went very well, outside of a request for the videos J had provided to be in Chinese, not English. Duly noted, he’ll work on that, let’s get the heck out of here!

We had a few hours before we had to go to the airport, and had been told we’d be able to go take showers before we left the country. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case. Our room keys didn’t work. While I retrieved my suitcase, the boys were realizing we had no room, and the ever-resourceful J resorted to stealing a key from a maid’s cart and breaking back into one of our rooms so we could clean up a little.

In the meantime, S realized he had left his laptop back at the haunt. Dammit! We got a hold of someone at the park, and were told, “Oh, we’ll bring it to you at the park gate.” We got into our shuttle van, went to the park, and were greeted by one of our interpreters who was holding just the laptop, not the bag/power source/assorted stuff. So S had to run back into the park to get his stuff.

He came back looking really unsettled.

“What happened?” J asked.

“Well. Um. You know that pile of walls? Since we’ve been gone, they tore the front facade off the haunt and extended the front of the haunt with those walls, and then put the facade back on.”

I don’t have an ‘after’ pic, but I’ll try to make that make sense. This is what the front of the haunt looked like when we left it.

Our actual haunt had a full beautifully detailed facade, but you can’t see it because of this archway thing that was in front of the concrete pad where we were told to install the haunt. What the owner had opted to do was to move the facade in front of this arch and then use the extra wall panels to connect the facade to the rest of the haunt.

I’ve never seen J look so stunned. I still personally can’t imagine how that could have worked. But somehow, this final tailspin of confusion and bewilderment seems to me to have been the most fitting way for the gig to have ended.

I’m so very glad I had the opportunity to haunt overseas. It was amazing and bewildering and it taught me things about myself I didn’t expect to discover. Not all of those discoveries were good, and I’m still processing some of that. But overall? Holy poop, y’all. I helped build a haunted house in CHINA.